Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

Enter Joe Chen, scrap metal importer. Joe was big in those days, but that’s relative. Compared to a state-owned goliath, he was small-time and interested in one thing only: selling scrap to the highest bidder. So if you, a small-time engineer, wandered into his yard in search of a few buckets of brass with which you could make ballpoint pen balls, he was going to sell it to you—so long as you had the cash. And sell he did, all day long, to scrap buyers large and small, each in his own way building businesses, products, and buildings across Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta. Unlike the customers of China’s big state-owned metal companies, the buyers of imported scrap metal (from importers) were small, entrepreneurial, and new. They were also revolutionary: no longer would China’s entrepreneurs be denied the materials necessary to make their products. Scrap was eroding the key choke point of China’s centrally planned economy.